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319 comments on Rate the race: 2011 Indian Grand Prix

I think that Massa needs to learn that sometimes it is better to concede a place than take a line and risk breaking the car. Webber and Alonso have been great examples of this this year. The most obvious being Webber at eau rouge, Alonso could have run him off, but it would have damaged his car and could have hurt both of them. Take Hamilton Massa in Monaco at Lowes, if Massa had conceded as Schumacher did he probably would have avoided contact and perhaps later stayed in the race. With regard to the kerbs, the fat kerbs are dangerous, if a driver makes a genuine mistake he could be launched and hurt… however Massa needs to stop making these mistakes. I thought his penalty was harsh today but no harsher than the vast majority of penalties dished out to Lewis.

@sw280 Very well put… I’m pretty sure he’s seeing the red mist lately, just as Lewis appears to have mellowed and adjusted his mind-set, Massa steps up to the plate! At least it makes for interesting races!

Looking at the results, I think people were expecting a whole lot more than what was offered. There was some good stuff out there – like di Resta, Perez and Petrov working their way through the field early on with a reverse strategy.

I think that if the Indians can clean the circuit up for 2012, and if they rent the circuit out to other categories (and maybe bring GP2 along next year) to get some more rubber down, I think it will be much better.

I agree PM, plenty on offer this race. It a little quite at the start but then settled into a nice race with enough to keep me occupied.

It was also nice cause it wasn’t as hectic as other races. Some races this year have been amazing sensory overload.

I have not seen the Massa Hamilton incident again but for me it looked like lewis wasn’t up far enough. I think lewis might actually realise that he didn’t need to do that there and that he could have waited and made it stick and taken a result.

Can’t believe Webber soooo bad.

Happy for Schumi and Button.

Impressed with Alonso he just keeps positive and working hard even though the car is lacking (lewis take note).

I think there are bigger problems with the track than simply dust. Turn 4 was a constant source of annoyance with it’s 20 lines in but only 1 line out making it impossible to gain an advantage from taking a wide line.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work at all, Ragerod. The fastest line through the corner is the wide line – staying out to the extreme left and clipping the apex as a driver normally would. The “twenty lines” through the inside of the corner are designed to facilitate overtaking by giving an attacking driver plenty of room to make his move. We’ve seen drivers hold position for laps on end (Schumacher fending off Hamilton for 30 laps at Monza springs to mind) because there are only two lines into the corner: the racing line, and the defensive line. But here, a defending driver cannot defend every racing line into the corner. The attacking driver has more space to position himself. Even if there is only one line out of the corner, physically placing yourself between the apex and a defending driver means that you dictate the speed at which both cars exit. The problem is that the sheer amount of dust made the inside lines going into the corner unattractive.

Lol. Massa should not be a F1 driver – if he can’t position his car in the right place (eg. away from the orange bumps). Even most amateur drivers can avoid a huge great big orange bump. He is either a very bad driver or need his eyes tested, or a combination of the two.
To Massa, “please go to Team HRT next year”. Amen.

The race was OK. I wasn’t bored, because there were battles to watch, but I wasn’t excited either, because there wasn’t much action. The battle with the Toro Rossos were fun, the Hamilton-Massa battle is becoming really irritating, the Webber-Alonso battle was interesting, and Schumacher’s race was fun to watch. Hamilton’s race was disappointing after the incident with Massa, but Button had a strong race, so it’s a compensation..

There wasn’t much Massa could do, @taurus – he actually held the racing line. Even if Hamilton had made it cleanly through the corner, he could have had to brake just to make the next two, which would have made him slower for turn eight and turn nine, and Massa probably would have been able to get him in the giant turn ten. It was a racing incident, and I think Massa was unfairly penalised; after all, Hamilton had only drawn partially alongside him. Perhaps it was a show of good faith for Hamilton to demonstrate that the stewards do not target him unfairly.

@prisoner-monkeys I agree Massa shouldnt have been penalised. The fact a penalty was issued is down to the over-the-top stewarding of the last few years, where by any contact whatsoever is punished. If Massa hadn’t simply chopped across we may have seen a good battle for position. He knew Hamilton was there.

I don’t share everyone’s negativity about this race. It was still enjoyable for me, it had it’s share of tension and incidents. 4 different teams in the top 5. It reminded me of some of the races in the last decade. Surely most of the people here still enjoyed F1 then, it’s just a matter of taking a different perspective – I liked being able to take the time to really follow the timing screens and the live comments on this site. To me races like this are like relaxing with a whisky, where a lot of the races this year have been rounds of tequila shots. Both can signal a good evening but the outcomes are very different!

Not a classic, but I’d still choose watching a race like this than doing almost anything else.

I gave it 6/10. I felt it was pretty boring, but that’s after we have seen some pretty good races this year. I think this track and this event can provide a lot more, esp. if it is less dusty; and maybe different tyres.

But as it was, the race became a poster board for how F1 in 2011 goes, as BBC said – it had all the common elements, apart from a HAM penalty, I suppose.

There were some good fights in the midfield, but too much DRS – I keep having the feeling that w/o DRS there would have been other, better, overtaking opportunities, although HAM trying to overtake the Ferrari’s via the pits is an ominous sign of how it could all go.

I hear BBC saying Button the only man to regularly race Vettel this year – unfortunately, it rarely is a real race, just Button being 4-5s behind, matching on pace as he’s managed by Vettel being asked by his team to not go for that fastest lap, sadly. And that’s the best someone is able to do. Great job once again by Vettel, clear why he is the WDC of this year. But please can we see him have a less simple time of it, maybe even a real fight for it? Guess not.

Webber has been competitive with Vettel in 2009 and 2010. Now all of a sudden he istn’t.

Webber’s KERS never seems to work and neither does the strategy that they give him.

I wouldn’t be surprised they decided to focus even more effort on Vettel after the Vettel vs Webber incidents in 2010. From that it was clear they simply want Vettel to win and they don’t want Webber to get in the way of that.

They don’t need Webber to fight Vettel to bring in the constructors championship. Giving Webber P3 to P6 is enough for that.

@Ragerod, this seems like a reasonable explanation. Assume something similar is happening at McLaren (not regarding the “future of the team”, but the direction of the car to suit a specific driving style).

To be honest, the racing itself perhaps was not worthy of a 7, maybe more a 6. But the track is good and I would class this as a great inaugural race. Given the instability of the world economy at the moment it’s encouraging to see a race that might have a more long-term home than what we saw in Turkey. Of course, India is on the up in the world so perhaps better placed than most but let’s not take away from India’s success.

I think people are judging this race a bit harshly because Vettel didn’t look threatened at all during the race – the reality is he hasn’t been really threatened (he always seems to have some time in the bag) for awhile now. I would say that this race was better than South Korea for example, where it was a similar story with Vettel, the only reason it looked a little different was because he slowed up to allow Button to catch up a little in the end.

The director is also at fault, the interesting battles between the Toro Rosso’s, Force India’s and Renaults weren’t followed nearly enough, especially the alternative strategies of Di Resta, Petrov and Perez. The intra-team battle at Mercedes was pretty good too, Schumacher’s

It’s a shame that this poll isn’t “Rate the race weekend: 2011 Indian Grand Prix”, because the pre-qualy/race features were some of the best yet, everyone’s excited about a new circuit and that excitement passes over the airwaves. The scenes in the pit lane after the race were reminiscent of Japan (however I don’t think anyone can realistically expect to have grandstands full so long after the race like in Suzuka).

Anyway, based on the average rating South Korea got I gave this race a 7, and I fully expect the race to be better next year – hopefully when formula 1 will be a bit more competitive at the front end.